My apologies that there have been no new posts on this blog for nearly a year.  Because my personal and professional lives have taken a new direction, my Microsoft blog will be closing. I highly recommend the Speech @ Microsoft blog for more up-to...

Throughout my career at Microsoft, I've eagerly participated in mailing lists, newsgroups, and web forums to engage customers and learn more about their needs and foster direct communication. One of the better forums for speech recognition is run by Professor...

We're always looking for feedback on how to improve Windows Speech Recognition.  If you are a frequent user, please take a moment to respond with your experiences.  You can email us , or leave a comment below. What mode of microphone control...

Here is a quick and dirty C# console application that will list out the installed TTS engines and associated properties.  Make sure you add System.Speech to your project's list of references. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using...

Check out the "Mojave Experiment" , where Microsoft brought in people to show them a un-released version of Windows. Having been part of the Windows 95 team , and then shipped components in Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista, I'm used...

My friend and colleague Karin Meier is the person I work with when putting updated speech content into the Windows SDK. She recently blogged about some odd requests she's gotten for old software.  One of them was " where can I get the Microsoft...

There is a typo in the documentation for the ISpRecoGrammar::SetRuleState method in SAPI 5.3 .  The input parameters are listed as: HRESULT SetRuleState( LPCWSTR * pszName , void * pReserved , SPRULESTATE NewState ); This instead...

I'm happy to announce the availability of the RTM release of the Windows SDK. This release - the first RTM one since Vista - contains the following speech-related items: Updated : SAPI 5.3 documentation Updated : System.Speech documentation ...

This is a little user interface rant of mine since I'm speech and keyboard-oriented. While editing text, when I say "Press Shift F Ten" or press the Application Key (to the right of the spacebar on Windows keyboards), I expect the context menu to appear...

I'm constantly amazed that people think that putting shortcuts to programs on the desktop makes accessing that program "easier". For the second time in about a week, I've encountered people asking how to put shortcuts to programs on the desktop...

Last week the speech team wrapped up a milestone of work and to celebrate I took up our group program manager Richard Sprague up for a quick tour of downtown Seattle, the Eastside area including Bill Gates' house and the main Microsoft campus in Redmond...

Our friend in the multimedia group and prolific blogger Larry Osterman is writing a series of articles on how volume is treated in Windows Vista. There is a whole new audio sub-system in Vista and Larry's blog is a great source of information for developers...

I've personally found the upgrade process from Windows XP to Windows Vista to be seamless. However, I know that people have concerns about their software and devices working with a new version of the operating system. In Windows Vista there is pro-active...

Rob Chambers is passionate about speech and a prolific blogger. Something that I've always wanted was a list of all the commands that Windows Speech Recognition recognizes. I knew I could probably scan through the internal grammars that WSR uses, but...

How I wish I had this tool last month as I was without power and telephone/DSL service at home and looking for a Internet hookup. Sure, Starbucks and McDonalds have WiFi, but Starbucks wants $9.95 for 24 hours. McDonalds will give you 2 hours for $2.95...

On an internal blog at Microsoft, I came across a posting by a Corporate VP on some books he was going read while on vacation. One of the books was a autobiography of one of my hero's, Gene Kranz , who was Flight Director for several flights in Project...

When our new speech recognition for Windows Vista was demonstrated at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting this past August, it went disastrously ( read about it at my personal blog , along with links to the video). As I said in that posting, I was...

You can download the full Windows SDK from here , but if you just want to read the documentation for SAPI, you can do so from this link . To browse the Managed Speech API documentation, here are the links to the various namespaces: System.Speech...

The Speech API Software Developers Kit (SAPI SDK) contains the documentation, samples, and header and library files to create applications and utilities that use speech recognition and voice synthesis. In addition, the SAPI SDK can be used to create speech...

When I get around to posting a bio, you'll find out that I have a background in making technology accessibility to people with disabilities. I worked in this area for Windows 95 through Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 2.0 through 4.01. With the...

One of the things I love about Microsoft is that you often get talk with, or listen to interesting people. Over the years, I got to shake hands with Steven Spielberg (wearing a Microsoft Bob baseball cap), Jay Leno ( Windows 95 launch ), Stevie Wonder...

[This posting originally appeared on my personal blog . I'm copying all my speech related blogging to this new MSDN hosted blog. I'll be doing an introduction post soon.] I'm in Pittsburgh this week, attending the InterSpeech 2006 conference. Actually...